Is anybody else sick of all the scammers out there trying to rip people off for jailbreaking iphones ?

We've obviously received some great news lately, what with the recent legal win for jailbreaking (The Library of Congress found that jailbreaking your apple device is legal). We also got the first jailbreak application for iphone 4 on August 1 thanks to the iPhone Dev Team.

What has amazed me however, is all the fake people trying to capitalize on these things. There are not just one, two or even five websites trying to get people to pay them for "exclusive" jailbreak software, but more like a hundred. It goes deep, with lame websites and fake twitter accounts of people flooding the internet with all sorts of false information. Its sickening the lengths people will go to a) screw other people, and b) steal other people's software and ideas. They are just lazy looking to make a buck off somebody else's hard work. What a shame.

So for those of you out there looking to jailbreak your phone, remember that the software to do it is FREE. Never pay anybody for the software to jailbreak. Now, if you are not technically savvy, get a friend to do it, or find somebody cheap on craigslist to do it while you wait, and only pay if they do it right.

For those out there not well versed in the jailbreaking terminology, here is a quick guide:

An iPhone is NOT ACTIVATED if it shows the "connect to itunes" screen and won't let you do anything but an emergency call. Once you ACTIVATE the phone, you can use apps, wifi, etc.

An iPhone is JAILBROKEN if it has had special software installed which allows you, the user, to install software packages from non-apple sources. The most common application to look for is called "Cydia" which is a different kind of "App Store" for jailbroken software. For other phones (like Android phones), this process is called "rooting" a phone. Its pretty much the same thing as jailbreaking.

Finally, most phones are LOCKED to a certain cell phone provider. For iPhone in the US, that means your iphone is locked for use with ATT only. Once your phone is UNLOCKED, then you can put in a sim card from any GSM phone provider. In the US, that means T-Mobile, and maybe some others. Many people that travel internationally do this, because you can drop in a sim card from a phone company in another country and it will work.

So to summarize, any iphone must be activated before you can do anything useful with it. An iphone CAN be activated without being jailbroken or unlocked. Likewise an iphone can be jailbroken without being unlocked, and of course they can have all three.

Packt Publishing put up an article I wrote about getting started with Facebook application development using CFML. This was based on a presentation I did at NCDevCon last month. Take a look, let me know if it helped ya...

http://www.packtpub.com/article/facebook-application-development-with-coldfusion-railo

I'm considering writing another article about using the new Facebook Social Plugins and the new Graph API since it is a bit different from the old RESTful API that most developers have been using.

Yes its actually true... This may be a little old (released in April 2010), but quite interesting!

So many of us are wondering what turn Apple will take next, and when, if ever, they will every start playing nicely with Adobe. Seems that the underground community isn't thrilled with that lack of progress, so people have been actively working on getting linux to run on iphone hardware, and now have managed to get a build of android OS to run on iphone 2G (1st generation). Yes, this potentially means the ability to have flash apps running on your iphone hardware. Not yet, but potentially.

Check it out:

Source: http://linuxoniphone.blogspot.com/2010/04/ive-been-working-on-this-quietly-in.html

Lots of aka's (i know). Flex 4 SDK (open source) has been out for a while, or at least as a public beta. Now that Flash Builder 4 (the new IDE that replaces Flex Builder 3 -- note the product naming difference), there is a lot to be excited about.

A new skinning system that brings in the best of declarative graphics and fixes quirks with scale 9 and manual skinning of components. Supposedly everything is a lot more efficient and light weight. Flex 3 was pretty to look at, but a bit memory intensive. I don't have specifics on that yet, but all improvements are welcome to make it scalable for larger apps.

It is also designed for backward compatibility, so hopefully all our Flex3 apps compile nicely.

Looks like a great upgrade! If you are into ColdFusion/Railo as well, be sure to check out their bundle of Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion Builder at a good price.

Here are some details: http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/overview/

Packt Publishing asked me to write a bit about Railo. It took me forever due to being busy (as always), but here they are! Enjoy and share the love.

Introduction to Railo Open-Source CFML Engine:
http://www.packtpub.com/article/introduction-to-railo-open-source

Tutorial: Rendering web pages as PDF using Railo
http://www.packtpub.com/article/rendering-web-pages-pdf-using-railo-open-source